Game of Data: A Look at Big Data and its Quest for the Throne

“Big Data” is more than just a technology trend or marketing terminology—it’s a vital part of the modern business. Gartner's IT Glossary describes Big Data as "high-volume, high-velocity, and high-variety information assets that demand cost-effective, innovative forms of information processing for enhanced insight and decision making." What does that mean for you?

Big Data has the potential to unlock a wide range of patterns and trends, much of which can help with better decision making and business strategy. Whether your business needs to adjust the price of a product or even change your hours of operations, Big Data can play a crucial role in the way you choose to manage your business.

1. Volume

Businesses generate and gather high volumes of data every day in the process of doing business. Think about a simple transaction: You can't just sell a widget; you need documentation about who made the widget, where the parts for the widget come from and what they cost, how you're going to market the widget, what you're going to charge for the widget, what you're competitors charge for the widget, and so on. There are a lot of pieces of data that are generated or shared in the course of a day, and the volume of data is just one aspect to understanding Big Data.

2. Velocity

The speed at which businesses move is faster than it was five years ago, thanks to technology and the interconnectedness of global organizations. Not only are there large amounts of data being created, shared or stored, but the speed at which that data is generated has increased.

The "drinking from a fire hose" cliché perfectly applies to the fast flow of data into and out of organizations non-stop, all day, every day. Most businesses don't track where the data comes from, how it can be used, or where it's stored. This part of Big Data is important to understand as it’s a core component of why it’s the data deluge has created the need for a new category of data collection or storage.

3. Variety

On a regular basis, businesses generate a diverse amount of data such as customer buying habits, website traffic, music downloads, HR or finance information, or research information. This data is often created or received as structured data, which means that rational or logical data isn’t in an easily searchable database or spreadsheet. This can also be called unstructured data, which is not easy to analyze or categorize and makes up a majority of businesses data which requires additional algorithms or intelligence to sort through. To add to the complexity of variety, unstructured data comes in all shapes and sizes, .Digital files such as photos, videos, audio recordings, email messages, documents, books, tweets and presentations are all forms of varied, unstructured data. Data diversity is an important element when it comes to understanding the difference between Big Data and other types of data.

Information, Insight, and Decision Making

Analyzing Big Data requires that you first separate the "wheat from the chaff," ultimately making the data accessible and useable. The right aggregators and data integration tools can gather that data into useable containers and provide you with the proper algorithms to access that data in informative ways. Organizing the data into a central repository is an important step in Big Data management. The analysis of the data is also where you gain the most insights that are actionable for your business. In today’s ever changing business climate, if you aren’t using your organization’s Big Data to your advantage, you could find yourself one step behind the competition.

Protecting That Data

Businesses must pursue dedicated data management solutions to securely and efficiently manage their Big Data migration needs. These tools must not only be capable of moving large information sets quickly and effectively, but also ensuring the protection of that data when it is in motion, as this is when Big Data. Solutions designed specifically to meet the needs of Big Data movement can help safeguard the information as it is sent and received by individuals and departments within a given organization and between locations.